CHAPTER 22
Several wartime episodes did not reflect well on politicians in Britain, most notably the demands by prominent leftists like Sir Stafford Cripps, Aneurin Bevan and Michael Foot that as soon as the Soviet Union was invaded by Germany, British lives should be risked in an invasion of Europe that would, at that time, certainly have failed. Nor did the war prevent inaccurate sniping from the press. On 5 March 1942 the Daily Mirror printed a cartoon produced by the columnist William 'Cassandra' Connor and his friend Philip Zee that showed a sailor clinging to wreckage with the caption 'The price of petrol has been increased by one penny'. Labour Minister Ernest Bevin and Home Secretary Herbert Morrison were infuriated by the implication that they were conniving at profiteering and demanded that the Mirror should be closed down. At Churchill's urging they settled for summoning Cecil King, the proprietor, and giving him the dressing-down of his life. The Homes Fires episode of the series permitted King to represent the incident as an attack on the freedom of the press by Churchill and in the same vein portrayed Bevin's legal action against a strike at the Betteshanger colliery in Kent in January 1942 as unjustified repression, obscuring the fact that strikes over wage differentials and 'who does what' were as much a feature of wartime Britain as they were of its post-war industrial decline. 'Churchill's speeches rang less true these days,' affirms the soundtrack. 'The hopes of the British people were moving away from Churchill,' it continues. Away from the Conservatives, most certainly: but the throng that cheered itself hoarse on VE day, 8 May 1945, when Churchill appeared on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, and continued to do so wherever he appeared during the 1945 General Election, suggest that the electorate did not so much vote against Churchill, but in favour of change. I believe that many of those who cast their votes in 1945 remembered what had happened after 1918. Then, too many of the men who had fought so hard for 'a land fit for heroes to live in' came home to face unemployment, and there was a firm determination in 1945 that the same thing should not be allowed to happen again.
LUCY FAITHFULL
Child evacuee organiser
When the evacuation scheme was first announced by the government and it was explained to the people what the evacuation scheme was, this posed the parents with the most terrible and cruel dilemma. And particularly for the women – the men knew they must stay in London – the women had to decide whether to go out with their children under five or whether to stay in London, whether to keep their schoolchildren with them or whether to allow them to go out. No one should think that this was an easy decision – why not keep your children with you, which is the natural thing to do? But against this was the terrible thought that there was going to be gas, that there was going to be terrible bombing and death, and the children would be maimed. And by and large, with of course notable exceptions, parents did decide to send their children out and I always feel that probably they did this knowing the teachers, and knowing that their children would be in the charge of the teachers whom they knew and whom they respected. When the train drew out a kind of stillness came in the train when the children realised they were leaving parents behind, and they weren't parents who were waving gaily to them but parents with tears streaming from their eyes thinking they'd never see their children again. Then, in the train, a liveliness would break out; then there would be the arrival at whatever place they were going to. Then they would be herded into some hall, then the foster parents – the people who were going to have children billeted on them – would come to the hall and some of them were wonderful, some of them would just take children for the sake of the child. Sadly, others would choose children and then there would be the terrible situation that at the end one or two unattractive children would be left, and I can remember one case when nobody would have this child and there was this terrible sense of loss on the child's part.
OLIVER LYTTELTON
President of the Board of Trade 1940–41
I had a medium-sized country house near Rye and I went into it very carefully indeed, and I came to the conclusion on my wife's advice that we could take eleven children, something like that. And thirty-one arrived with their two junior nurses, I think. They were pretty dirty and two of them had impetigo. I put them into a large room – you've no idea, I'd no idea that such things existed in England – they relieved themselves all over the carpet and the place was a shambles. Well, you might say that I ought to have known that this sort of thing happened, but when their parents came down to see them on Sunday in motor cars I realised things were different. I mean, I wouldn't have thought that parents would have allowed a child to become lousy, or with impetigo and relieve themselves on the carpet and at the same time have a smart motor car.
LUCY FAITHFULL
Then when no bombs were dropped and the Phoney War was on, parents didn't see why they should be without their children and the children certainly wanted to be back with their parents, and of course there was a great flow back. Now it could be said that this was a wasted experience but I don't think it was, because when the bombs did drop and the war really started, as you might say, in earnest, children went out with not quite the apprehension that they did in the first instance.
J B PRIESTLEY
English author and broadcaster
By May 1940 the people of this country felt they had to fight and fight hard. I don't think most people realise that the British called up a larger proportion of their population for war service than any other country. Far more than Nazi Germany, women and all. The summer of 1940 has stayed in my memory as a very exceptional summer in Brighton. It was rather hot and what I wanted to do in the Postscripts broadcasts was to relate the little homely things I'd noticed, like ducks on a pond or a pie in the shop, breakfast and so on. The theme was the war and the way people were taking the war. I think if the Postscripts were popular, as I believe they were, it was that tying up of the big war theme to the small, homely things that gave them their popularity. We were really alone. Certainly I don't think now that Hitler was ever really determined to invade this island, but we didn't know that then. And the eyes of the world were undoubtedly on Britain. Now this was important for two reasons – first, immediately, because of the war but also for another thing I brought into those Postscripts, which was that you could never keep things as they are. I always remember a play Daphne du Maurier wrote called The Tears Between about an officer who didn't want any changes, he was just fighting for the world he had in 1939. I don't blame him, but it's a curious notion because after a war there must be changes. I mean either they'll go one way or they'll go another way and either they'll be worse than they were in 1939, or better. This was my own view, and so I expressed the view that we were fighting the Nazis but we were also fighting in a sense for our better selves. We were fighting for a better Britain and this made the broadcasts popular to a good many people and made them very unpopular with some other people. But they were under the illusion that you can keep things in one place, and you can't.
RAB BUTLER
President of the Board of Education 1941–45
One of the great features of my Act was the settlement of the religious issue. Over half the schools were church religious schools, and over half those were out of date. I brought in this idea of putting three-quarters or seven-eighths of them under the council, which was highly controversial, but if I hadn't done that, you would have trouble now. You have no trouble with Roman Catholic schools and no trouble with Anglican schools and all the rest are under the council. I think it was a great achievement because that had alarmed Churchill in 1902, when he'd had the religious controversy which made education so bitter. The Roman Catholic hierarchy came round and were very distinguished, nearly always dressed in their robes when they saw me, with a little chaplet hat on the head and those crimson robes, makes you sit up if you're only dressed in a poor old suit like I am. And I argued with them and told them they'd get more. What astonished me about the meeting with Peter Amigo, Archbishop of Southwark, was that his cathedral had been bombed and his palace had been bombed, and there was no proper means of keeping out the chill winter air. He was dressed in full canonicals and I climbed up a staircase which had not been bombed, so it was possible to go up it. He was sitting there and he said, 'I can never agree with politicians' and as he'd been nominated by the Roman Catholic hierarchy to talk to me I thought this was a bad start. He then suggested we might pray, so I said I was quite ready to because I was also a Christian, and little by little we began to get on terms. But he wasn't exactly friendly to start with and nor was Cardinal Archbishop Arthur Hinsley.*55
MICHAEL FOOT
Left-wing journalist
When the Russians came into the war, were brought into the war by Hitler's attack on Russia, we started – and it was organised partly by the Soviet Solidarity Society, which was predominantly Communist of course – a Second Front campaign was organised in which many of us participated, many of us who were not Communists like myself and Frank Owen, who had been editor of the Evening Standard, and Aneurin Bevan. Of course we were also stating a view which was the same about the Second Front and about support for the Russians which Beaverbrook [Foot's employer] himself was expressing inside the Cabinet when he was there. Anyway we started a campaign in the country in which we advocated this and undoubtedly we had Secret Service – or whatever it was – people sent to our meetings.
DINGLE FOOT
Liberal MP and Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Economic Warfare In the first war you had to give coupons for restaurant meals, but in the second war the Ministry calculated that the more people ate out of their homes the better, because in fact less food is consumed. They therefore wanted to induce people to eat in restaurants and particularly to eat in canteens, and for that reason quite deliberately meals taken outside your home were exempt from rationing. The great difficulty we discovered was to get a great number of British workers to eat in canteens and many of them insisted on going home even though it meant eating up the family rations.
OLIVER LYTTELTON
It was quite simple – the difference between rationed clothes and free clothes is four hundred and fifty thousand workers, simply that. I came to the conclusion when I looked at the manpower that this was a necessary thing. Winston was opposed to it because he held a rather simple, straightforward view that the civilian population which kept up its morale the longest would end up the winner. I told him that I thought the population wanted to do something, particularly the women, after Dunkirk, wanted to feel they were part of the war. 'How dare you tell me what public opinion is, where did I find you?' he said to me, that sort of tiling. So I said, 'Well, all right, I still think that' and when it came off and people were glad to be a little bit shabby and felt that they were doing their stint, he was absolutely delighted and announced to everybody, 'Here's somebody who taught the Prime Minister something he didn't know.' That's a very engaging feature there – most people don't like it at all when other people turn out to be right.
MICHAEL FOOT
There wasn't a tremendous protest about the suppression of the Daily Worker, chiefly because that took place during the period before the Russians came into the war. But at the time when the subsequent threat was then made to the Daily Mirror, the Daily Worker case was brought up with it because the action against both was done under Regulation 2–D. As subsequent matters have revealed, the government was very near the complete suppression of the Daily Mirror, which would have, undoubtedly, caused a tremendous ferment because the Mirror was the spokesman for the feeling of many people up and down the country, and expressing it probably much better and more openly and much more bluntly than many other newspapers. Moreover the threat to the Mirror,which so nearly succeeded, did have an effect partly in emasculating the Mirror – I don't say completely emasculating it – but certainly the tone and temper of the Mirror's criticisms of the government were modified and of course it had an effect on newspapers throughout the rest of Fleet Street. But I must say that if anybody looks at the papers of those days they will see that the government ministers – everybody – were bitterly criticised in the general press and even more in individual weekly newspapers like the Tribune or the New Statesman, so the idea that there was any general suppression I think is false.
TOM DRIBERG
British Independent Labour MP and later Soviet spy
I think Britain was freer than any of the other countries, probably, within the war. We had the rights of Parliament reserved, which was something, but it wasn't a free society in other respects. There was censorship but one newspaper had been suppressed, the Daily Worker, and the Daily Mirror had been warned that it might be suppressed, so it wasn't a free society in that way and of course, perhaps necessarily, we were locking up people without trial, the Fascists and people it was believed would be pro-Hitler and pro-Nazi if Hitler invaded. [Leader of the British Union of Fascists] Sir Oswald Mosley and his wife spent most of the war in Brixton prison – that's not part of a free society, imprisonment without trial – but it was agreed to at the time, under the pressures of wartime necessity, by pretty well everybody, including myself.
DINGLE FOOT
Sir Oswald Mosley was a very sick man, he'd been interned for a number of years without trial and I would have thought anybody who was in favour of civil liberties would be glad to see him released, whatever his views might be. This wasn't the universal view and you even had the National Council for Civil Liberties making a nonsense of its own name by resisting his release.
CECIL HARMSWORTH KING
Proprietor of the Daily Mirror
The shares remained absolutely steady, sales remained absolutely steady, the only man who thought it was going to be shut down was Churchill. When it was brought up in the House of Commons, on the whole the House came out on the side of the Mirror, more or less. They didn't like the Mirror but they weren't going to have it suppressed. And after that we trimmed our sails a bit and the government forgot their foolishness. I was told at the time that the relevant episode was earlier. The country was covered with posters of Churchill and underneath it said the word 'Victory'. After we were thrown out of Singapore under conditions which did the war direction no credit at all we got a former member of your [Communist] Party to write a piece in which he said, 'There's a victory yourself, Mr. Churchill' and that was said to have annoyed him more than the loss of Singapore. After that he was looking for an excuse to suppress us and the cartoon was just what he thought a suitable occasion.
TOM DRIBERG
Things were going very badly in North Africa. Independent candidates were beginning to be put up to challenge the official coalition Cabinet because there was a party truce and if a member died or retired, his seat went automatically to the party who had held it. From about 1942 Independents started challenging this fix and one or two of them got into Parliament. Several friends said they thought I should consider standing. A month or two later, listening to the radio at night I heard that the Conservative Member of Parliament in the constituency in which I lived in Essex had died and I thought it was a chance and I took it. I hadn't the faintest idea how to be a candidate, I didn't belong to any party, didn't know the electoral law. First I went to see my employer, Lord Beaverbrook. I was working at the Daily Express and he was a bit sceptical and the only advice he would give me was that I must wear a hat: British people will never vote for a man who doesn't wear a hat: He was completely wrong, as on so many things: I didn't wear a hat and I got in. On polling day – this was before the age of public-opinion polls – Beaverbrook was giving a lunch party in London; he said that according to his best advice from his man on the spot in New Maiden [Essex], I was going to forfeit my deposit. In fact I won by a two-to-one majority.
ANTHONY EDEN
British Foreign Secretary
When Tobruk fell on 21 June 1942 Churchill was in Washington and the American press carried alarmist reports of the state of the government at home and possible votes of censure. Winston rang me up, I suppose about midnight his time, to ask what was happening, whether the government was still in office and what was going on. And I was able to tell him as far as I knew nothing had happened except that this motion had been tabled, which he'd have to take. By then Russia had been attacked and Pearl Harbor had taken place, so though there might be a rough passage there was very little doubt how the whole business would come out in the end and that there would be an Allied victory. The debate wasn't all that formidable for a number of reasons it's not worthwhile going into here, and once it was over the government was in comparatively calm waters. I was Leader of the House part of that time and there's a difficulty, in wartime: everyone nominally supports the government, all parties do, but that doesn't prevent quite a few people in each party suddenly thinking they want to be critical and that it wouldn't endanger the government. But from outside it looked as though there was much more criticism than probably there was and in itself it was healthy. It is remarkable, really, that during a war we were able to continue the conduct of Parliament like that with critics, some of them very formidable ones, saying whatever they wanted to say in public session or secret session.
TOM DRIBERG
I remember two persons in particular who were very helpful, both Christian Socialists. Although an Independent, I'd always made clear that I was a socialist and one of them was vicar of the famous socialist stronghold of Flaxted. The other even more interesting one was Jack, who was a person in the constituency and secretary of the Braintree local Labour Party, Braintree being the principal stronghold of Labour votes in this largely rural, largely Tory constituency. So he was in a bit of a dilemma because all the parties were officially supporting the coalition government. But I wouldn't have got elected if it hadn't been for the thousands of Labour votes and he came out and formed the committee in Braintree which promoted my candidature, for which, needless to say, he was removed or had to resign from the secretaryship of the local Labour Party, quite correctly in the bureaucratic sense. And then there were all sorts of other people. I daresay a few Tories voted for me because there was universal uneasiness about the war, they thought it was time for some fresh blood and then the Communists were supporting the war effort, Russia was in the war by now and the secretary of the local Communist Party also got expelled from his party for supporting me. He came out on the evening of poll and testified in the most dramatic way at a meeting in Braintree market square, because he had just heard the Conservative candidates had said that what was going wrong in North Africa was because too many supplies had been sent to Russia. The most dramatic event, which was a national tragedy, was the fall of Tobruk, which certainly pinpointed the need for changes pretty high up in the armed forces, if not in the government. I think Tobruk fell about three or four days before polling day in the election and it was a tragedy and we felt it was such, but nonetheless I'm bound to admit that it probably greatly added to the number of votes we got.
DINGLE FOOT
Secret sessions of Parliament did serve a particular purpose; it didn't mean of course that the government revealed any state secrets or military secrets. Obviously you don't do that to six hundred people, even though they are Members of Parliament. But it did enable the criticism of the government to be expressed much more freely than it could have been done in open debate, in which of course if somebody made an outright attack on the government that of course assisted the enemy propaganda, it was helping Dr Goebbels, and therefore people found it far more convenient to make their attack in secret session.
TOM DRIBERG
The impact, as so often with these great Parliamentary occasions, there was a bit of an anticlimax when you get there, and in this case the anticlimax came instantly in the opening speech of this ineffable old Tory, Sir John Ward, because he made this fantastic suggestion that there should be a Supreme Commander of all the armed forces who should be none other than the Duke of Gloucester. But there was a roar of laughter and a howl of disappointment from various parties in the House, and from then on the debate never really recovered its momentum. Although Nye Bevan and various others spoke very forcibly in support of the motion that 'This House has no confidence in the central direction of the war', which was a direct attack on Churchill, in the end Churchill won it very easily.
MICHAEL FOOT
I went to the debate because it was soon after the fall of Tobruk and the whole situation was extremely serious and the motion was going to be moved by Lord Milne on behalf of the critics, because the critics embraced some on the Tory side and some on the Labour side. Well, Lord Milne started off his speech by suggesting that one of the ways we could deal with the situation was to put the Duke of Gloucester in charge of the military forces of this country and I'm afraid this did not conduce to the effectiveness of his speech. It looked as though the whole vote of censure was going to be blown up in derision and so Aneurin Bevan got up in the most awkward circumstances on the second day to try to repair this situation. There was not the slightest doubt that the whole place was shaken by what he said, partly of course because his criticisms fitted so closely with what many people in the House of Commons knew to be the truth of reports from the front and partly because it merged into a general misgiving, which was widespread in the House at this time, about the general strategy of the war. He concluded the speech by emphasising demands about the Second Front – which was not so widely shared in the House of Commons, although of course it was shared by many strategists, particularly in the United States.
RAB BUTLER
We had very few home civil Cabinets in the war. We had this committee under Reconstruction Minister Lord Woolton, which really did splendid work; it finally approved my Education Bill. It launched the bill of the Health Service and Beveridge's plan, it launched the whole of the postwar housing plan and the Insurance Bill which the Labour government introduced in 1946 – also some very powerful Labour men were on it: Bevin, Attlee and Morrison. Churchill didn't take much interest really but he was pleased to support the Reconstruction Committee. He had a great regard for Bevin and he was pleased to support any social reform that Bevin supported. Bevin was a most remarkable man because, practically uneducated, he managed to deal with everything, including the whole foreign affairs of the country, and he was one of our greatest helps on that committee, and Lord Woolton was a very good chairman. We had two or three Conservatives on it, a man called Oliver Lyttelton was very bright and helpful, and then that sinister figure Lord Cherwell we used to call 'The Prof. He represented Churchill on the committee and hurried off to tell him the news after every meeting because Churchill wanted to know how we were going to go in for nationalisation. And we had a proposal by Herbert Morrison to nationalise the electricity industry and that's where the coalition government stopped and they couldn't get agreement on that. But Herbert tried to get us to agree to nationalise electricity, which after all we agree to now. The Conservatives felt we mustn't go too far in wartime on the home front and we'd already gone a long way because the Health Service is one of the biggest things in any country in the world. There has never been a plan like the Beveridge Plan and it was all planned in that committee.*56
MICHAEL FOOT
Defence Regulation 1AA [banning strikes in essential services] was introduced by Labour Minister Ernest Bevin with the support of the whole of the official trade-union movement, but here again Aneurin Bevan understood better the ferment outside and there was a massive unofficial strike among the miners because they felt they were being extremely unjustly treated. That was not understood by the official leadership of the miners or by the official leadership of the Labour Party as a whole. This regulation was introduced by Ernest Bevin to try to deal with the kind of threat of strike action that, as he was saying, was incited by unofficial agitators. Aneurin Bevan poured scorn on what was said and argued that the official leaders of the unions didn't understand what the rank and file were thinking and saying.
'BILL'
Betteshanger Colliery striker
There were several of the local residents, and particularly some of the troops, they were jeering and sneering at us, but little did they know that at the time we were manning this pit twenty-four hours a day, with the Home Guard, troops and ourselves, and many of us worked and stopped at the pit here twenty-four hours a day, so that in one sense we were patriotic in the safeguarding of the interests of the other capitalist owners. I don't think Churchill would have interfered. I don't think he wanted us to go to prison – I think he wanted us to stay here and guard his property, because it was his property after all, it wasn't ours.
LIEUTENANT HUGH DANIEL
Eighth Army dispatch rider
I'm sure it was at the time of Alamein, or a little before, there was some industrial dispute in this country concerning the miners, the details of which I've never followed up. But when this was reported it did cause tremendous distress because at that time I remember being with the 50th Division, Tyne and Teesdale, and these lads from the north-east were really baffled. They were fighting hard and enduring hardship and they couldn't understand how back in this country, when even Russia had come into the war, they couldn't understand how the miners could be squabbling back home when everything was needed to push the wheel round.
TOM DRIBERG
There were lots of Jews serving in the Polish forces stationed in Britain, this was a good deal later, early in 1944 when the British forces were getting ready for D-Day and they didn't want any trouble in the rear, and so there were some difficulty about these unfortunate Jewish soldiers. They were being persecuted in the Polish forces stationed in Scotland and about one hundred of them deserted or went absent, came to London to hide in the East End and sent a message to me and I went to see them. It was a very dramatic moment in a darkened hall in the black-out, groping one's way through East End Lane to find this obscure hall, and great tension in it, as these hundred and twenty men sat around. I couldn't see them properly and they told us of the appalling persecutions to which they were subject and the constant insults. Again and again a man would say that one of his supposed mates, the Polish soldiers, would say to him, 'When we land in France, one bullet for a German, one for you, bloody Yid.' So we had to take this up in Parliament and there was quite a tussle about this, but the War Office gave way rather reasonably and rather quickly and agreed that because of the impending D-Day they agreed to transfer all these men en bloc to the British Army and they settled down very happily.
ARTHUR BOTTOMLEY
Trade-union leader and Walthamstow borough councillor
There was a lowering of morale and near panic in Dover towards the end of the war, but this was understandable: Dover had been bombed and shelled every day for four years. To the rest of the country the war was over, but to Dover and Folkestone and those areas it was not. Dover got a particularly heavy bombardment and I had to go down and explain to them the reason why they were suffering was because the German guns on the French side were so heavily fortified. If the Canadians who were there had made a frontal assault, thousands would have been killed. I'm very glad to say the people in Dover and elsewhere accepted this and I want to pay tribute to the people of Dover and Folkestone – they knew more about the war than any other people in this country, including the fighting men, because they had a battle on their doorstep every day
JOHN ROGAN
Air Navigator, Eighth Air Force, USAAF
The most vivid memory I have of World War Two was not a combat experience. I remember the sights in the Underground in London where many of the children were sleeping against the walls and we were told that some of them had stayed there for periods of weeks and hadn't even gone up to see the sunlight.
LUCY FAITHFULL
There was a small survey done when the war was over in the London area and a number of children who had been evacuated for the duration of the war were seen and assessed and a control group of children who had remained in their own homes in London and had therefore not gone to school, had slept in the Underground with their parents at night, had not had school meals or school milk. These two sets of children were assessed together and as far as it was possible to make the assessment the children who had stayed in their own homes in London with all the apparent disadvantages were taller, were heavier and were emotionally more balanced and happier children than those who had been in billets in the country for the duration of the war away from their homes and families.
MICHAEL FOOT
Aneurin Bevan was always getting into trouble at the Party meetings where the majority supported the leadership of Attlee and [Ernest] Bevin and those who were members of the coalition government. But Aneurin Bevan understood better than most of them – and they were deeply occupied of course in their tasks in the war – he understood the ferment that there was outside. There was deep, widespread radical ferment that was illustrated in the election victory for the Labour Party in 1945. Bevan had prophesied that victory and was confident it was going to happen when most of the others did not believe it was possible. Indeed, Bevin and Attlee wished to sustain the coalition government after the war and it was largely the awareness of the ferment in the country, and of how radical it was and how Labour could put itself at its head, which Bevan realised, which destroyed the possibility of the continuance of the coalition and gave Labour the chance to get independent power.
RAB BUTLER
In my day education wasn't chartered as being so expensive, but the Beveridge Plan was mentioned in millions, and Churchill got very worried and his two Chancellors of the Exchequer, Sir Kingsley Wood and Sir John Anderson, were equally critical. And that's why the Beveridge Plan was delayed after my bill, that's why education came first.
LUCY FAITHFULL
During the whole of the evacuation period I think that in the field of child care and in the field of family life we learned more than we perhaps would ever have learned otherwise. I think that the great mix-up of different types of people in different areas, town and country to the forefront, underlined a tremendous need in the country overall, and I think therefore that the evacuation was the impetus to social legislation following the war.